Housecleaning part 2: Moving our mailing lists

Part 2 in our housecleaning series concerns our mailing lists. Hosting mailing lists is quite a pain and we’d rather leave this pain to people who specializein mailing lists. So, we are proposing to do the following things:

If you have any comments on any of these solutions or proposed list consolidation ideas, please let us know. Also, if you know of a cheap/free/good list provider that we didn’t list, please let us know!

My feedback about Google Groups : it does the job, but if you allow for non-subscribers of the ML to send emails, expect a lot of false spam positives. Reversely, but in a lesser extent, some false negatives get through, too.

I would hate using gogol groups. I like Nabble it’s like the least wost ML→Forum I know (I only know the two used at MB, the other being not so good, I don’t remember the name). 🙂
I’ll go and check the others you say and I don’t know yet.

Sorry, “hate” was a big word, I just don’t like it very much, and I’m not fair anyway since I don’t like mailing list.
I don’t understand the structure of gogol groups, it’s difficult to see where we are, what are the latest emails etc.
And most of all drawbacks, it requires you to have a gogol account… or does it not ?

I vote for librelist, the technical foundation looks really clean, and as for UI issues, I think their web archive UI is irrelevant, since we can direct people who want a web view to read the list via gmane or nabble.

I’m not keen on using Google, I’d prefer to see an open solution. I don’t care much about the UI because I read the lists via gmane. The most important thing is that the archives are readily searchable and linkable via unobfuscated URLs.

jhamdotme: discourse is great for small websites. But firstly it’s still not for sale, as it’s not released and it needs ROR hosting platform which is quite expensive.
I’m more into simplified forum software like vanillaforums, although they still need so much love in coding 😦